Google Calls Its Social Search Effort "Your World" But Only Includes Its Own Products

Google wants to connect you to your online social world — well, at least it wants to connect you to the social products it pushes, Picasa Web and Google+. Their new joint venture between the Google search engine and those two social media sites will start rolling out tonight.

Using the line “Search, plus Your World,” ComputerWorld says the linking of the two Google worlds is an attempt to make it easier for you to find information on the World Wide Web as well as see content your friends have posted privately on Google+ and Picasa social networks. That means no YouTube or Blogger yet.

Google Fellow Ben Smith said Tuesday’s move is just the beginning for Google search in the area of privately shared social media content. “There’s a lot of opportunities for us to expand this,” he said during an interview.

The big question is whether the new search capability will ever expand beyond Google, to sites like Facebook and Twitter. Facebook and Google aren’t exactly best pals, in case you haven’t noticed, and it would take a lot of wrangling for the two to agree to any kind of content sharing.

And as the bulk of users’ worlds these days is centered on Facebook, it’s not clear exactly how Google will be able to provide access to “your world” online without it.